Transcript for "Ask Me Anything with Reserv's VP of Strategy, Matthew Lu": Hey, Matthew. Uh-huh. And hey, Chad. Yeah. Hi, everyone. So good to see you. Well, we can't see you. Well, we could see each other. Yeah. But welcome. We'll get started in just another moment. Hope everyone's having a good day. We're excited to get started. Sweet. Sarah, I'm excited to see you Friday. I know I've seen some of you and the Rippling team a couple days. Very excited. Yes. Yeah. That'll be a good time to have you in the office for sure. Yeah. Hey, Siri. Thanks for answering messages on chat. Oh, god. I activate my Siri when I said that. Oh, that's awesome. Alright. I'll give it just another minute, and we can go ahead and get started. Sounds good. Well, I mean, the re the really crazy one sorry. I'm looking at chat. The really crazy ones, you're having, like, a very serious like, a real real, you know, serious thing, and you're gesturing, and Apple gives you, like, the thumb. See if it doesn't hear. It doesn't. You get you give the thumb. You're like, yeah. You know, things are going up or whatever, and it gives the awkward thumbs up in front of, like, a huge meeting. It's just like, oh, gosh. Awesome. Alright. Well, I think we can go ahead and get started. Let's do it. Well, just love to welcome everyone to, today's webinar. I'm happy to introduce, myself and Matthew. We're gonna be doing an ask us anything or ask him anything, I guess, with Matthew, who's the VP of strategy over at Reserve. But before we kick that off, I'm just gonna introduce myself. My name is Sarah. I am a senior HR solutions consultant here on the Rippling team. I've been in HR for about 6 years now. Prior to joining the Rippling team, I worked with companies of all different sizes, ranging from about 200 to 5000 employees in various industries. And I talk to HR leaders just like yourselves almost every day. So hopefully, I can be a resource on today's call. But, of course, the main event here, the star of the show is Matthew, who's the VP of strategy over at Reserve. So love to hand it over to you to, introduce yourself, Matthew. Awesome. Hey. I'm Matthew. So I'm employee number 2 at Reserve. We have some slides here, but I can just kinda start talking about it a little bit. So, Reserve is an insurance tech company. We're about 3 years old. We are in the claims management space. We're tech enabled services, and the vision really is that we can give really, really good data using technology, in 2 specific ways. Right? Like, we can help people, customers and and claimants, people call in and who are trying to get their claims done accurately and quickly and just have really good service. We think technology can make that experience significantly better for all the people who are, submitting claims. And we also think that we can give data back to underwriters that most third party administrators really can't do, and that just makes it better for everybody. Right? Like, the insurance carriers can do this at a lower cost. That means cost savings for claimants. That means just, businesses that maybe never would have been able to get insurance suddenly can because there's data on them, and insurers could actually feel comfortable underwriting them. So we're sort of on a mission here to make insurance available to, like, a lot to a very long tail of businesses that really could use insurance and really need it as well as for that, like, large already served population and just make it better. So kind of on a mission there. We're 3 years into it. Been a bit of a ride. I think that's kind of why Rippling is interested in chatting, and we have interesting stories to talk about. But it's it's been a hell of a ride for for 3 years already. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm so excited to dig in, like, especially as we've gotten over gotten to know each other last week. Like, I'm so excited for more people to hear more about your story. So, just to go over a quick agenda, I have, a very little bit of housekeeping for for everyone on. We'll talk a little bit about rippling just to make sure we have the lay of the land there. We did, well and then we'll dive right into Matthew and and do the AMA. So without, without getting too far deep, definitely don't wanna have any death by PowerPoint, but wanna be sure that we cover some quick housekeeping items. So first off, of course, this webinar is gonna be shared and recorded, with or recorded and then shared with you tomorrow morning. And there's a whole bunch of you here, and I see some of you are already using the chat. So please feel free to use that. Connect with fellow attendees. Make sure if you'd like to ask any questions there, feel free. We have some Rippling team members behind the scenes today helping us. They're gonna be monitoring chat. And so, if it gets a little too busy in there, of course, like, focus is on Matthew. We may shut it down. But just make sure that, if you do have any questions, you can go ahead and plug them in there. And then the last thing, you may see on the top of your screen a button that says book a demo. So if you haven't heard of Rippling before, you're interested in learning more after today, please feel free to go ahead and do that. It won't kick you out of the screen we're in or anything right now. You can do that kinda on the side while we're in here. And then, of course, if you have any questions after the webinar, there's a website or an email address there for you to to, to reach out to. Just a really quick overview of Rippling. Hopefully, you all have heard of Rippling before. You're here. But just as a very quick overview, Rippling is a global workforce platform that works with small and midsize companies around the US and really around the world to help free smart people to work on heart problems. We'll talk a little bit about that today. But we work from companies anywhere from about 10 employees all the way up to 10,000, with HR teams as lean as one champion all the way up to teams of, you know, 10, 15 people. We were founded here in 2016. We're actually headquartered in San Francisco where where I live, but we do have offices around the world in Canada, UK, India, and Australia. Obviously, we're known for our modern use, modern and easy to use technology. You can see all these different ratings and stuff here. So if you haven't taken a look at Rippling for HR payroll benefits, IT spend, global payroll, the list goes on, please take a look. But I really wanna think more about, like, how rippling can be used by our customers. And that's one of the ways that one of the reasons Matthew is here today to talk about how him and the team at Reserve are one of the companies who, really have utilized rippling and found it so beneficial and indispensable, I guess, for your business. So, I would love to turn it over to you, Matthew. Before we dive into the AMA, just tell us a little bit more about reserve. I know we covered some of it already, but also just a little bit about how you're using the tool. Yeah. So let's we've covered kind of what reserve is. Let's start with kind of how we initially thought about running it. I think, David and I David's employee number 1. We're both we're both exeBCG. We're both looked out kind of at the industry, and we've both been chief of staff to one of the cofounders before. And we kind of looked out and and tried to be thoughtful about kind of the history of the ZURP era and what it was like as a startup before and just wanted to really commit ourselves to having that discipline to run lean. And we think we've accomplished that, both in our early days when it was, like, me and David incubating all the functions to now we where we have all our functional leaders, Sarah, you're meeting some of them on Friday, where they've really taken that discipline and and carried it on, and they've really executed against that vision. And so as part of this is we were looking to make sure that the company would run, looking for elegant software solutions, right, versus trying to throw bodies at the problem. And we found Rippling pretty quickly, recommended to us from Y Combinator friends, did some research, did RFPs, talked to a whole bunch of people. I think we were very, very impressed that Rippling runs on Rippling. I think that's a huge testament to the belief that you guys have in your own product and also the fact that you're actually able, you're actually able to to see your own problems. Right? You're able to see what it must mean to be a lean leader, running a lean org and how do you solve for that with software. And so, you know, Sarah's pulled up some stories about us here where back in summer of 2023, we were 17 people, and we won a gigantic account on July 3rd. I was literally, like, preparing for the July 4th barbecue, and you get this news. And you're just like, oh, well, that's the there goes there goes my July 4th. But we scaled from 17 people to, like, 250 over the course of a year, which is really, really crazy fast. I mean, immediately then and there, we had to hire 40 people in 60 days. And the point is at the time, there was just, like, me and David and a couple other people and trying to run all this out of Rippling, out of a couple other applications, and really committing to being lean while suddenly staffing up really quickly for our growth. So I just think very highly rippling. I think rippling was pretty key to our ability to execute there. And so this is me showing a little bit. Right? Like, you should totally talk to them. Like, you know, you don't have to pick them, but talk to them. Like, think about how they can help you, and think about, like, all your other vendors too. Like, look for vendors that really commit to that vision of lean that can help you execute on that. Awesome. You know, I love a little organic rippling pitch. I actually was a rippling user at my last two companies prior to joining the rippling team, and I think that's a lot of the reason why I came over to join is I just, like, believe in the product. So I'm excited to dive in and talk about some real life stories that people have sent over, that relate to, your your experience. So let's go ahead and dive in. Thank you everyone so much for sending it to me. We, fun fact, we actually didn't have to make any of these up. These are all actual questions that you sent over. So thank you so much for for taking that time. But let's go ahead and kick things right out of the gate. The people wanna know, Matthew, what does your day to day look like? How how do you and how do you continue to balance daily priorities while also scaling a business really rapidly? Yeah. And I think it's actually this is very relevant in the age of remote work. So, Chad, I don't know how active you guys are here, but, you know, raise your hand or throw a comment out in chat if you guys are if anyone here is fully remote. Let me know what it what it what what you guys are doing. I'll keep answering. But curious to see how many of you guys are fully remote. And so I think this answer, really is reflective of the fully remote world that we're in. So I'll answer this sort of strategically and and tactically. Right? So, strategically, there's a lot of tension between 2 sort of mutually exclusive things. 1 is thinking time, and the other is, like, heads down execution time. And so if you think about execution work, especially when you're a lead leader, there's, like, never ending amounts of work to do. Like, there's always something you could be doing. At the same time, in order to be maximally effective, you want to be thinking very clearly about how to prioritize and so on, and that's thinking time and and and working backwards from the future of what you think your objectives are in going back. And I think, actively speaking, you see this during the scale up process. You really have this issue where you're incubating functions, and you're also trying to kinda have some gauge of when it's time to hire someone and and actually have somebody dedicated to that function, dedicated to that work so you can have more time for thinking time. So I guess my day to day, I guess, and this is so fully remote. So many of the apps we use, whether it's Rippling or other things, is available on your phone. Right? So I'll wake up at, like, I don't know, 7:30 in the morning or whatever. And, like, for better or for worse, like and I'm not saying this is great. For better or for worse, I'll roll over, grab my phone. Your Slack's already firing off. There's stuff going in your abs, and you go through and you start working. And at the at peak at peak ramp here, when we're going from 17 to, like, 90 people, I could potentially get stuck on in the bed on my phone growing going through stuff for, like, 2 and a half hours. There's just, like which is not necessarily wonderful, but, like, that is how that goes. And you start to learn, like, okay. I I need to think through how to how to gauge when it's time to to scale up. And one of the things I used to do was like, look. If I'm spending my entire morning all the way to launch on a function, it's time to like, I'm I'm doing on recruiting. I'm doing it on on HR. I'm doing finance. Like, it's time to start recruiting for a leader. And if I'm still working on that by, like, 2 o'clock, it I I I'm late. I'm behind the ball. Right? So that's sort of how I think about it. Right? Like, you you do have to execute, but you really have to make sure that you are hyper aware that the execution is coming at the cost, potentially, of very, very valuable thinking time and prioritization. Yeah. Gotta make room for rest for sure and make sure that, like, you can reset your brain. 100%. Let's talk a little bit about, diving into, like, prioritizing things. Like, is there a workflow that you've used that's helped really you and your team earn some time back? Yeah. So I think in both so right out of the box, Rippling is very much designed for a lean people ops org. Right? And so certainly we've covered a little bit of of this in, like, hiring or you at least I've implied it in my story where it was just me running, PeopleOps alongside finance and compliance and IT and a lot of other functions. The onboarding flow is is is really great because you're all a lot of things you need to think of. Like, you're hiring the person, all the documents need to be signed, all the software and hardware provisioning that needs to happen. All that stuff sort of happens as part of the flow. I think the one that I value the most is potentially the flip side of that, which is offboarding, which is a really tough topic. And as somebody who doesn't come from people ops, like, I I I I worked on HR cases, back when I was at the Boston Consulting Group. I've worked on those before, but offboarding was very new to me. And that is really a, like, rubber meets road problem where there's admin work that needs to get done, but this is fundamentally, the clash between business necessity and, like, the need for human empathy. Like, it is not a good fit, and that's it is important that both the company and the employee parts ways. It's good for them. It's good for us. But from, like, a human empathy perspective, that's a tough conversation to have. It is a tough moment for them. It is a tough moment for everybody involved. You really want to be able to focus on that human element and be able to listen and talk and, like, be responsive and present in the moment when you're having these conversations. The last thing you need is to be thinking about, I need to press this button. I need, like, remember to do x y z. And so having that automation workflow that's built in, it's it's not like a sort of some workflow that you configure. It's sort of built into Ripley. It's it's thought through that way where you press one button and all these things happen. All the documents get sent out. Boxes get sent out to recover hardware. Software gets deprovisioned. A wide variety of things that you don't have to think about. So you can really just focus on the human element and and trying to be present and and and, frankly, like, human, right, in the in the moment. I mean, Sarah, you're you're more of an HR professional than I am. Surely, you've you've sort of experienced this. Yeah. Putting putting the people back in HR, I think, is so important. And you're right. Like, that's that's actually, like, Rippling's mission statement is free smart people to work on hard problems. A termination in any capacity, whether it's voluntary, involuntary, it's a reduction in force, that is, a hard problem that you have to sort through. And so having a tool that could eliminate some of that, like, manual work and making sure you don't have to do any final payroll calculations or things like that certainly helps you focus on that moment to ensure that that person is handled with care. So I love that info. In any ways, that is the hardest moment. Right? Like, think when when when the tagline is out there, like, free smart people to do hard problems. I think we all think of this in, like, the positive exciting way of, like, oh, yes. What strategy am I gonna use to win? Like, yes. True. Also true. Like, also true that when you're a team of 7, 8, 9 people, you do want to be able to focus on strategy and thinking about go to market, thinking about your product strategy, product marketing, etcetera. That's true. But when it really when rubber really meets road, when you really desperately just need one button to take care of things, I think offboarding is probably where I appreciated it the most where Yeah. The need for that to just be taken care of and the need to be human and focused, is so stark. So I anytime I terminate someone or think about it, my hands still start to shake. And so the fact that you can, like, reschedule that and really not have to think about that and focus on, like, caring for yourself and caring for that person involved is so important because it's it's not easy. No. A 100%. Yeah. You're right, Siri. Extending human empathy when you're doing that type of work is really hard. And I think back to, like, the pandemic also, like, having to handle all those policies and things. And especially in a world where we're getting fed, you know, well, HR people are the police and, like, they're not here for us. Like, really taking, re like, owning that conversation and saying, like, no. We are here for you, and these are the ways that we're trying to support you. I love that. 100%. What is or are some of the strategies that you've found most effective for fostering an engaging and positive workplace culture while also managing compliance. Right? Again, keeping the a great theme here with the keeping the human and human resources. How are you handling some of those logistics compliance wise while also trying to keep your team focused and excited? Yeah. And so every start up, I think, goes through this problem, and it is it goes back to this idea of tension. A bit of background we didn't we didn't actually, I didn't I forgot to go through, I suppose, is my background. So I I have a background. I'm trained as a lawyer. I no longer practice, but I was a lawyer at Skadden Arps and then a management consultant at, the Boston Consulting Group. And I think the ex let's call it the professional anxieties, I guess. Right? Like, of those two experiences really capture this tension. Right? So on the one hand, when you first start out, it is very similar to a case consulting team when you're at BCG. It's a small group. Literally, possibly the same number of people. Right? Like, 4 or 5, 6 people. And you're in, like, very high trust mode. You're very small. You're very agile, and therefore, you have, like, maximum permissiveness, maximum autonomy. And so everybody feels very engaged. The culture is also easy. It's just 7 of you, and you probably all know each other. At least we did. And so that's easy. It's it's you don't have to really set up that many guardrails outside of the common sense controls of, you know, do a person control over your finances, etcetera, etcetera. You you you you very much lean into the idea that we're pulled from the front. People who are solving that problem can make decisions for the whole org. The whole org gets 7 people. As you get bigger and so we're now, you know, we're now over 300 people, and and I think very reasonable to think that in a short amount of time, it's entirely possible it will be a 1,000 people. That's not necessarily possible. You do really want to honor this idea of being pulled from the front, which I don't know, maybe we'll get into later. But there's a there's a a great book that's, like, foundational to the US Marine Corps. It's called Warfighting, and they talk about this concept of being pulled from the front. So if you hear me say this, that's that's what I'm referring to. And this idea that the people who are directly engaged with the enemy or the conflict or then and there solving problems, They're the ones who are gonna have the best tactical knowledge on how to move and what decisions you can make, which is different than being, like, pushed from the back where someone really far from the battlefield or far from the situation is, like, telling you from high down what to do. So how do you honor this idea of being pulled from the front, while still respecting the need for control? And this is, like, where the the, like, lawyer training in these. Like, you need bright line rules. We need bureaucracy. You need to serve these layers of management. And the reality is that you need, not just for cultural reasons, which I think is where this question is going to, but also from pure agility reasons. Startups are always going to be outnumbered. You're always outnumbered. You're always outgunned in every single way. Resourcing, whether it's financial or hardware or something like every possible way you are gonna be smaller than than the industry you're trying to disrupt. You have to move quickly. And so you need to find that balance of having controls while building in flexibility. And so we've always really tried to do that. Right? Where okay. What is the minimum amount of bureaucracy? What is the minimum amount of rules and regulations I need to put in while still giving a lot of trust and autonomy to our employees to solve problems? So I'll I'll give you an example. Right? This is a a, like, this is a problem that, you know, Sarah and I, we're gonna talk about on Friday when we talk about, like, rippling and its capabilities going forward. You want to make sure that your employees have control over the laptop. Right? Because especially the engineers, they have all sorts of tools they wanna be able to install that are going to be productivity enhancing. At the same time, you also wanna make sure there's not spyware getting from you. How do you manage that? So what is that, like, sort of, like, gigantic list of allowable software that's been certified, that's signed off? You wanna have that intermediate step that isn't like, no. You have no admin control versus, yes. You are the total and sole admin of your computer. How do you sup calibrate that role in there? And I think that more than anything is how you actually foster that positive and engaging culture. Because you can say, oh, we're, like, we empower you blah blah blah. But if you don't actually listen to them and let them have autonomy, that there that culture isn't there. I don't know. What what do you think, Sarah? Yeah. It's such an interesting perspective, and I maybe one of the things that I, like, I ran into early on in, like, one of my first HR roles was having, you know, fresh out of grad school, knowing what it was, you know grad school for HR development, by the way. So, like, truly by the textbook trying to make strategies. But then the other side of the coin, thinking about, like, what is the risk tolerance of the business? And those were, like, the ends of my spectrum, and I had to find the middle. So I had to figure out, like, what all of the founders thought was good and, like, where we all found on this meeting. And we went through, like, a couple different topics. How do we feel about, how do we feel about performance management? How do we feel about recruitment and retention? Like, all these different, like, kind of milestone strategies. And then we went through and, like, did basically, like, a scale analysis where we all, like, dropped a dot, and then we dropped a pin on the next one. And so that was that became, like, my map for how to write these strategies. Am I gonna go really heavy on, like, payroll compliance, but, like, maybe a little more lenient on x y z topic? And that really was, an important, important moment in us trying to focus on doing something that felt right for the culture, but also something that was, like, in favor of our people. So Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I mean, I think, like, a a a, like, tactical way of thinking about this is always have a safety valve or escape valve in your rules. Right? This is the bright eye rule, and exceptions can be granted by the executive team. Right? Like, this is what we're gonna do. Exceptions be granted by the right? That that idea that you are still able to appeal to someone and say, like, we need to move quickly. This is the way. Generally, we don't need to do this, but if we are going to, this is the way. And have that ability to for the executives to quickly pivot, I think, is really important. I think that's that is how you that's how start ups balance, staying nimble and staying this fast moving force given that they have to go up against people that are much bigger. You know? Yeah. And I imagine, actually, you're probably gonna continue to talk about war fighting in this next question because I think that transitions nicely to, like, some of the hurdles you might face when you are growing growing rapidly and, like, how you handle that kind of pushback from leaders, when you're, again, trying to go by book or trying to do the thing, but there's other business priorities. How do you how do you manage that? Alright, Chad. We're gonna do book club here, for a hot second. Also, speaking of the chat, if if any of you guys are veterans or or any of you guys have veterans in your family, extended family, or friend group, I was really lucky. In college, there were, I knew a lot of veterans. They were, at that moment where where I went to undergrad, they made a big push to make sure that soldiers coming back from the war on terror could use the GI Bill and and go to school. And so I got to meet a, just people who had life experience that are, like, wildly different than than what I had and would share some of this, in subsequent law school as well, like people who who joined the Marine Corps and reflected on this. And I just I I was it was very thought provoking. So, yes. You're right, Sarah. I I'm gonna talk about this a little bit. So let me just give you a little background on that and why like, how I think about this question. So war fighting is the foundational text, I guess. It outlines the principles for the US Marine Corps. And one of the things that they always they they talk about in the book is that the consistent assumption the Marine Corps has is that we will always be outnumbered. Like, the Marine Corps is not, like, a gigantic force. Wherever we deploy you know, not we. Wherever they deploy, they will be outnumbered. And so they have to find other ways to win other than numerical advantage. And one of the things they talk about is this idea of temporal warfare, fighting time, moving faster, thinking about how you, make decisions faster, assess problems faster, and move quickly. And so the big one really is, like, how do you make decisions that are consistent with your strategy but are really, really quickly, especially as you grow? And so the biggest hurdle when you're scaling is the fog of war. Right? As you get really big, it becomes difficult to know what the right decision is because all of a sudden now your your team is gigantic. It's not the, like, 9, 10 people that you had before. And so they talk about being pulled from the front versus pushed from the back, And that's, again, going back to that concept of people who are solving problems right in front of them will have a much better sense of the nuances of what they're solving than the people who are, like, in leadership, whatever, like, further away from the problem. And so this becomes a communication issue. Right? How do you communicate your strategic goals so that everybody is highly aware of them, everybody, understands, and there's, like, a way to thought partner quickly, but that people are able to propose and then act relatively autonomously, their solutions. And and that does include one of the values that we have, right, is, at at Reserve is looking for solutions, not Band Aids. But sometimes you have to Band Aid quickly while you look for the solution. But the idea of getting people aligned to, like, we are going to look for elegant solutions. I need to know from you what the nuances are so that our product team can go after it, so their engineers can build solve that nuance in there. So I I think that's actually the the biggest hurdle. Right? It's like, how do you make sure you're able to get alignment across a large team? And I think that the second part of the question from the pushback is, what happens if, the feedback you get from the front, from the direct problem solvers is, like, it cannot be done. And leadership is, like, it does have to it just does have to be. We've all been there. Right? And I see in China, you know, someone someone's in their their path. They they've seen seen this. I'm sure they've heard the complaints on this as well. I think the answer, at least from personal experience, is being in the trenches with them, right, to carry on that analogy. You wanna be the first one in the office, whether you're virtual line. A lot of us here are. But you're the first one working, and you're the last one working. You're in there with them. So you're even if you're not, like, on the front, you're there. You're working with them. You're lock working alongside them. I think it's really important, 1, because that gives you, like, a much more granular understanding of the problem, and, b, it also means that you're willing to share the burdens. Right? And that you're there where, like, they're like, I need help. I I I'm out of bandwidth. I need some help on on x. I'll do it. I I don't care. Like, I'm senior. I'm working on things. Like, yes. Sure. I I I have some time. I will do it. There's nothing too menial, too granular, too tact, or whatever. Like, I will help out. Does that Yeah. Help answer that a little bit? I know we we went to, like, book club land there. Totally resonates with me, like, thinking about, like, being proactive versus reactive. Right? And then the other thing I was thinking about, it was just, like, the type of internal growth that you get when you pull from within. Right? If you think about who understands being in the trenches better than someone who's been there. Right? So you think about the employees and putting them on a path and showing them different ways that they can become a leader because they have that firsthand experience of what it's like to be there. I we're experiencing that on my team right now. Like, rippling's growing pretty rapidly, and one of the managers is now leading up our department. And it's a completely vast transformation that's really impressive to watch. And it's because he had that experience of being on the front line with us. And so I absolutely, like, resonate with this wholeheartedly because I think you're right. You have to the best managers know exactly what their people are doing every day. They're not just the puppeteer behind the curtain. That's awesome. Well, this one, is an interesting one. Especially you and I both come from lean team team experience. There this person says, I've worked at a few lean team startups where I experienced burnout rather quickly. How do you keep burnout at bay while also maintaining an engaged and productive team? So I'm actually gonna stray into book club land here some more. Both on war fighting, but there's another book, that really resonates resonates with me called Rest. Before I do so, I thought of something as well for that question that we just had. Do you wanna flip back up to that one for a second, Sarah? Sure. I think and this is really important. Right? If you what's implied by leading by being pulled from the front is 2 things. 1, you wanna hire people with a problem solving mentality. People who are comfortable with and excited about autonomy and stepping up and leadership and being that generalist, even if they are specialists in whatever field they're in, excited to be that generalist. That's number 1. And number 2, it also implies a strong need for mentorship and development. Right? Because you want to be able to take people who are early in their career because often, those are people who are, like, directly infraforming. Those of you who are who are military brats or you you come from the background. You know. Like, often, it's, like, younger people. Often, it's people early in their career who are, like, in the thick of the engagement. You wanna make sure they're mentored and that you're teaching them how to think from first principles, and often they already can. You just need to give them the confidence, help them overcome their imposter syndrome to be like, I think this is the right move. Yes. Tell me more. Like, thought partner with them. Right? And so there is an empowerment component to this. Okay. Sorry. Let's go back to the to the next question. Sorry. I just had a thought. You you build your bench. Right? Like, you're not hiring persons for their job, but you hire them for their potential. Yes. That we could talk about that all day. But, yes, let's go. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh my god. Chad, how many of you guys have have gone through this? How many of you guys, like, feel this deeply in your core? There you go. Okay. So, let's do book club for a second. Two books. The first one, of course, is warfighting. And and we talked earlier about the idea of temporal warfare in the book, which is you make decisions quickly. And so they capture this concept, with the idea of tempo. You're not just maneuvering in space. You're maneuvering in time. You need to move faster. You need to think faster, identify problems faster, make decisions faster. You if you can, like, disrupt their ability to think faster, then you, by definition, can, like, move faster and and and win. Right? Core to this idea of tempo is that you are applying this problem solving speed at a problem. And so there's components to this. Right? I think we hear all this a lot, which is, act with urgency. You have a culture for urgency, and that's really, really important. I think that is fundamental. Like, I cannot stress enough how important that is to a lean startup, to any startup, which is the idea of always acting with urgency. Again, going back to sort of this war fighter doctrine, you are always going to be outnumbered. If you are the disruptor, you are always outnumbered and outgunned. And so one thing is you can do better is be fast. Right? That said, there are moments where it is important to rest. The idea of tempo also is problem solving applied at a problem. If there's a moment, if there's any kind of moment where there isn't a problem or there's a lower priority problem, rest and recuperation becomes the priority. That is inherent in the idea of tempo. You have failed the idea of tempo if you don't rest. Right? You think about the need to resupply in the military, etcetera. 2nd book club, there's a book called Rest, and it's a really interesting book that talks about both the biological backing behind how your brain, how your neurons develop connections, which is when it's has unstructured free time, and a lot of anecdotes about leaders and and other thinkers who are in stressful situations who take breaks even in the midst of crisis because that's important to thinking creatively. And so one of the ones I read that stuck out to him is, like, Winston Churchill. He's down if you've ever been in London, if anyone's ever done this, you know, you can share your experiences in chat. You go to the war rooms where the u, the UK government used to run operations below London during World War 2, and they, have a room still where Winston Churchill would go take naps in the middle of, like, the blitz. Right? People are bombing London. You're in the middle of war. UK is outgunned. And he would take naps. And part of it was, like, the it's really, really important to have that time for your brain to process everything it's heard and form those connections and think through what the priorities are and work backwards from there. So Yeah. This isn't, like, a great great answer from a technical perspective. I don't have a manual for you. Right? I don't think if I did, I think I would be I would be the richest person on earth. Right? I could solve burnout for you. But I am giving you, sir, a way of thinking about the importance of free time from 2 angles. The first is you need it in order to be a more effective thinker. The other is that you are not actually fostering a culture of urgency if you are or or or or honoring the principle of tempo if you are not taking breaks when they're given to you because that is equally important and that sets you up to act at a very high tempo when you need to. It's the idea of dialing tempo up and dialing tempo down. Yeah. You have to, you can't show up and do your best if you're not feeling your best. Right? So having to take take rest, and unplug when you can, down times, things like that. And, also, I think not just in your day, but planning it in your life. I'm I'm working on my personal project these days is working at my year at a glance for vacations I wanna take, trips I wanna go on, things like that. And that's helping me, create, like, milestones I can think of. Okay. We're gonna do this big push at work because I have this thing that's gonna help me re recover on the other end. And so, obviously, like, people who have other priorities in life and families and all that, that's a little different. But I think, like, having really creating that work life balance, which I feel like is so buzzy, but, our our CEO here at Iplink talks about work as your sport. Right? Kobe I think we talked about this, Matthew. Right? Like, Kobe Bryant didn't just, like, show up once a week and play an impressive basketball game. He, like, woke up to practice every day, and he rested really hard and took that seriously. And I think that's an important, like, an analogy that I think of now that I'm deeper into my career and really thinking about this as a career, not a job anymore. When I made that switch, it helped me get into that sports analogy and think a little bit more like Kobe Bryant. Totally. And and and Kobe, of course, very intentional about his rest. Right? Like, very intentional about knowing getting those 10,000 reps in. Like, getting a ton of reps in, but also being very intentional that you have to rest in order to do those reps again tomorrow. Yeah. Or else you feel like, at some point, there is a limit. There's a biological limit, and just like there's an organizational limit, to that if you aren't applying tempo kind of smartly wisely. Yeah. Hopefully, that was a helpful answer for everyone. Everyone go, like, plan a vacation after this call. Awesome. Where, where and how did you learn both the soft and hard skills that have contributed to your success as a career? Rep rest is one of them. We know that. But how else you've been leader. We know that too. How else have you, learned some of these skills? There are two ways, I think, to answer the question. Right? So, like, the shallow the shallow answer is I am ex Boston Consulting Group. I'm ex Ganon Arps. I was fortunate enough to work at some of the best, firms with some of the best training in the world in their respective fields. It's like, I think the shallow answer is, like, I owe a lot to the people there and the training and the experiences there. The deeper answer the deeper answer is this. You can have that exposure. You can have those experiences, but without the mentorship, and the the mentors that really take their time out to walk you through what you're seeing and teach you how or show you show you how they're thinking, which is even harder than teaching, showing you how they think. You don't build those skills. And I'm really grateful because in both those situations and in both those periods in my life, there were people at the firm and people outside of my firm, people who are just, like, in my life who I think are geniuses and are really, really clever, who took huge amounts of time out when they really didn't have to to kind of walk me through first principles thinking of whatever problem I was going through. I they didn't have to do that. Right? Like and some of it's hard skills, like right? So hard skills, like, why how do I think this through mathematically? How do I break this problem down into constituent parts? What does it mean to break problems down? Right? Like, what is the right way to break problems down? How do you think about that? And then soft skills. Right? Like, how how do you be confrontational in a healthy way? How do you be maximally confrontational while doing this in an extremely healthy way where you come out on the other side with that person stronger? And I think what's really important, why I'm really grateful to it, and what what I'm sharing here, I guess, is they really didn't have to do it. And at various points, I think I was probably, like, hopeless. It just it probably felt to them like I was absolutely hopeless. Like, this was this wrong person to spend my time on, or at least I felt that way. Right? And so I I try to pay that forward in my company, and in my life. And I encourage all of you to do that as well because it is I think all of us, if we were to reflect back, we are where we are today because of a lot of the people that have helped us, when they didn't have to. Yeah. And we've we've talked a lot about here, right, where it was like we just have a lot of remote workers here in chat. I think the myth so it's not a myth. It is entirely true that this process is a little bit harder remote. It just is. Right? Like, what I really liked, as a lawyer was the partner would mute the call and be like, the person's talking in the call. And the partner's like, okay. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what they're saying, but here's what they really need. Blah blah blah. You can do this in person. It's a little bit harder than me. You can do it on Slack, but it's harder. The other one is, you know, you are BCG or doing a case. Somebody is modeling or they're whiteboarding or whatever. They're building slides, and they're just like, hey. Come sit next to me. Like, just watch, and I'll talk a live stream talking through the stuff. It is hard and remote, which means you have to be very intentional about it. And the evidence I have for that this is possible is and if anybody here is on Discord or plays video games or is involved in esports in any way, because I am. I enjoy that in my free time. We've been able to build communities for, like, 10 years now. People people that I have never seen or have only seen once that I hang out with hours a day or whatever, and we can build community and mentorship and support in those spaces. It is possible. It is real. You just have to be intentional about it. After a call or some assignment, like, take the time out, Slack someone, and say, hey. Like, let me walk you through why I thought that way. You're doing a redlining exercise. Have them go through it first and then take that extra time. It'll take more time, but develop the people around you. It doesn't have to be people in your team. Just anybody you interact with makes the company stronger, and it will leave an impact on them, that they will appreciate when they look back on it. Yeah. I, I I that sits really nicely with me because I'm thinking a little bit about, just like what what we're doing now and the times that you and I, I'm sure, in our own careers have been asked to do stuff like this. And the I I was actually making a joke with Matthew before we joined the call that I have a lot of friends, now in the city who, you know, someone has, like, a hookup for a restaurant, and someone knows how to get these concert tickets. Like, my my tip is that, like, if you you get pregnant or you're gonna lose your job or you have questions about HR things, like, that's my party trick. You can call me. You know? And I I think I feel so comfortable doing that for other people because people, have been available for me in that way. Not for actual, like, tangible career advice, like, what do I do, in this scenario, but more coaching related to, how can I improve this? What book can I read? How how do I get my boss to hear me in a different way? It's so, like, therapeutic. And if you don't have a mentor or a coach, find 1. And, also, you don't need 1. You can have one for all these different areas. And I think, HR people, again, we're human. We wanna pay it forward. So if you don't have that in your life, get it. Definitely. And I look. I I think there's a there's this concept of of safe spaces that I I, you know, I think there's a culture moment here where there's pushback on this idea. And I think look. Maybe fine. Right? In, like, this broadly applied way. In a in this very narrow way, this is a very real thing where with you are early in career, it is absolutely terrifying to be like, I have an idea. It is also absolutely terrifying to say, I have absolutely no idea what the hell just came out. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Make it safe for people around you, either their reports or just people around you to be like, hey, Slacky. I have no idea what just happened. Why did you make that decision? Like, isn't it isn't like this better? And be patient with them. Right? Like, walk them through your thinking. That's really important. That's how you develop people around you, and that's how you make an impact and and pay things forward. Understanding the why. Yeah. And I think, actually, now that I'm looking at this next question, I think we have talked about, like, where people can get support to continually learn and grow and build that community. Is there anything that you'd like to add just related to this specifically before I dive into some of the questions that have been asked in chat? Yeah. So okay. Like, I think the question I think this question's really getting at, like, what books can I read? What videos can I watch? Right? I think I think that's really going for it. I've given you a couple here. I think the way I wanna answer this is not like go read warfighting, go go read wrestling. Those are all true, and I think those are all sort of fairly in many ways, fairly obvious. I think the tying this into the idea of mentorship, I guess, in this case, to peer to peer training, peer to peer learning, is go find go intentionally find people either in your industry or out of your industry, in your function, out of your function, and go spend time with them. Again, the idea of unstructured learning and unstructured free time is important to just have time to dream, time to be with people who are solving problems, who are around difficult problems. And as you guys chat and as you hang out and have a coffee, go for a run, in my case, I have a group of friends or, like, Alex, Richard, and Way. Like, we go skiing once a year, and we it's Chatham House Rules. Right? We'll, like, share what we're we're kind of dealing with, problems that we're trying to solve, things that we're not sure about, and just hear what people have to say. These are very different people. Right? Like, one is a CEO and and founder, former VC guy. 1 is a, like, equities analyst, and the other is a product product manager. He used to be an accountant. Like, wildly different people, wildly different backgrounds, different experiences, different takes. And it is really cool to have that kind of, it's not conflict, but, like, arguments and and and and different perspectives. And it helps you see things differently. Yeah. I think peer to peer learning from other people, other hardworking smart people is is really important. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. Well, we've got about 13 minutes back. So I wanna be sure that we can cover some questions that were added in chat. 1 and we'll do these maybe rapid fire, Matthew, to be sure we can get to about 3 or 4 of these. I'll try. One question that, someone asked is, like, what would you say the difference is between a strategy and a plan? That is a good question. And so I think if you think about the idea of strategy, you are trying to prioritize among very competing objectives. And they're not always mutually exclusive, but they often are. And I think a plan is how you get there. But strategy is the combination of planning, in response to a pretty ruthless prioritization. You cannot do it all. And I think going back to the idea that you are always outnumbered and outgunned, part of the value you bring when you think through strategy is what should we do, not how do we do it, which is in many ways planning. It is what should we do? What is maximally value unlocking, and what are the trade offs there? And let's be pretty transparent about the trade offs. I think a way to get there I know this is rapid fire, but I I have, like, strong thoughts on this. The way to get there actually in many ways is is the idea of, like, structuring the problem and breaking it down into constituent parts. I think it facilitates a good discussion. And, our our our cofounder Martha has a has a great saying that I love, which is, like, strategy is a series of discussions. It is never is a conversation and never, like, a single kind of thing. It is a discussion because it is one that will always impact mutually exclusive or at least very, very competing sets of trade offs. And you guys all have to be comfortable. Everybody in the room has to be comfortable. Only one person makes a decision. Right? It's the CEO. But, like Yeah. Everybody needs to surface what those tensions are. Yeah. The strategy is, like, the North Star and the plan. The plan can evolve. Right? It's how you get there and how we need a quarter. The plan is you work backwards from that, from whatever you've decided the priority is and how you get there. Yeah. Another good question that came in, are do you have any advice I was trying to think of my own answer here too. Do you have any advice on on helping employees that get burned out easily due to their own lack of problem solving skills? That is an interesting question. Yes. And so, actually, I'm not gonna say due to lack of problem solving skills since that that sort of there's a way to there's a way to interpret this as, like, is this person getting burnt out because they're not capable of doing the job? Which I think there's, like, a that's, like, not I don't actually have advice there. I think a different way to think about this is problem solving as a prioritization exercise. And so maybe this is sort of me leaning to the sort of the strategy background here. But a lot of us who are here, who are in this chat, the fact that you're here, right, you're looking to get better, you're trying to, like, hear other perspectives, we're leaning to this peer to peer learning moment. A lot of us are perfectionists. I know I am. Right? And so we we talk I talk a lot about, a culture of excellence or seeking excellence. Mhmm. Like, the Greeks have this concept called arete, which is this platonic ideal of being the most excellent version of yourself. And you can apply this to everything. The most excellent version of x, of an organization, of a city, of a company, of a team that it can be. People who are that per who are chasing excellence often have a strong overlap with people who are perfectionists. And the answer is that one vast way to burn out is not prioritizing. You cannot do it all. Being strategic in your own life and your own work, and it's a mixture of both problem solving and communication. The problem solving aspect is, okay, I've got 10 things. I have time to accomplish, like, you have to be honest with yourself. Right? Like, I realistically can do 4. Yeah. How do I prioritize within the 4? How do I, like, then prioritize outside of 4? Like, what goes in the back burner in what order? And very critically, how do I get everyone else aligned to this? Like, you can't just keep this in your head. Your manager and your teammates need to know, and they'll have input, and they may change. And being very clear in how you communicate of, like, okay. Like, if we need to do 5 things, we are gonna have to trade off on x dimension. Right? Not quality, but, like, maybe we'll have to spend less time here. We're gonna have to, like, narrow the scope on one of these things. That put that that is problem solving. Right? It's the idea of thinking through prioritization and communicating and getting alignment, among everybody around you. Yeah. And I I think, if you don't mind me jumping. And I think one other thing I think about when I read that question is, like, what's that person's standard of excellence? And then do where does that come from? And do they can do they have the potential to achieve? You think about, like, a classic performance nine box, what is someone's performance and what is their potential? And I think this, like, kinda relates to someone else's question. How do you suss out issues ahead of time when you're hiring an employee or someone who's underperforming? I think rating on 2 different metrics really helps you. You can actually do this in rippling. But, understanding where someone falls on the performance metric and then where they fall on the potential metric and, like, where that falls in this, like, 9 box helps you understand how you can support them. Do I need to give them resources to help them with their potential, or do I need to give them some sort of performance or corrective action plan to help them with their actual performance, and, like, the tactile things that they're working. And so when you start to think about someone's, persona or their resume or, like, who they are at work, I often think about, what is this person capable of? What's their level of standard or standard of excellence? What's mine? And then, how will they perform in this role? What what hard skills do they have to be successful tangibly to get the work done? I love this. I think we probably have time for one more. I'm trying to keep it rapid fire. I promise. Yeah. Yeah. We should. These are our favorite things to talk about. One more, though, and then I wanna give everyone some time back and wrap up here. How as we're, like, thinking about strategizing, moving things forward, what's the what's the balance of keeping stakeholders updated and also involving them without having too many cooks in the kitchen and without, like, over bombarding people with news? How do you balance, keeping them informed and involved without, you know, being too much? Yeah. That's a good question. I think this comes down to facilitating buy in and keep keeping roles kind of segmented. So I think this is a problem that management's all solve really well. There's always a ton of stakeholders. There's the partner who sold the case. There's the clients. There's, like, the partners who didn't sell the case but are, like, kind of involved. It's, like, quasi their client, whatever. And I think that I found that that how they've managed it applies very well to to start up and, like, operator life, where you whoever's whoever's the project leader of whatever you're working on, go and your job is yes. It's to, like, sort of give feedback to your teams, but a huge portion of your job is making those stakeholders talk to each other and stay aligned. And it's like that my best answer for you is, like, look. Sunday night or Monday morning, whatever, go send out an email. Here is what we are doing this week. Here are our priorities. Here's how we prioritize in the trade offs we've made. Help me sort of understand if you guys disagree or whatever. Like, let's you can phrase this however you want. Work with me to figure out if this is in conflict with what you're thinking. That is kind of your job as a project leader is to go manage those stakeholders. The people who are executing, it is their job to provide maximal leverage upwards so that you can focus on keeping people aligned, and they are thinking through their problem end to end. I think that's probably the best model, I I can think of for trying to strike that balance. Does that help a little bit? Yeah. I think about it, there's a leader, also here at Rippling that, talks about his one to ones in a format called the 3 h's. Hear me, help me handle it. And when you were talking about, like, sending a recap email or something about progress on a project for a week or in a quarter, like, that's a great way to to frame it. Right? Here here's the quick hits that I just want you to know. Here's the ways that I need help, whether from you or someone else. And then here's things that, like, are beyond my control that I need handled by an ex like, an alternate party. So I think that's a great way to frame not just your one to one conversations, but any project recaps, things like that. What a what a good idea. Okay. Well, we've got about 5 minutes left. I just wanna wrap up here. Thank you so much, Matthew, for doing this. Thank you. And thank you, Chad. Thank you, everybody who's here. Yeah. Thank you, everyone who's joined us. I've I've I've so just enjoyed learning with you and from you and hoping that we can continue to do this, just in the course of, career networking. But if there are any questions, that didn't get answered today, our team is gonna work on some responses and send those back out. As a reminder, if you're new to Rippling, haven't heard of us, and you'd like to learn a little bit more about how you can use Rippling to free up your own, smart person to work on hard problems, like, I would love to have the opportunity for you to learn more. So please click that book a demo button. We are gonna be sending out a survey at the end of this call as well. So please take a moment to let us know what you thought. And lastly, just a reminder that we will be sending a recording out tomorrow. So thank you. Thank you so much everyone for joining. Thank you, Matthew, and have a great rest of your week, everybody. Thanks, Chad. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Catch you guys later.